I want to thank Professor Dell\u2019Oro for his invitation and kind welcome, and I want to say what an honor it is to meet and speak with you at Loyola Marymount, not only because of the academic excellence of your programs but additionally because I know that you have the ability to spread throughout the academic world, especially among Catholic institutions, the substance of what we say here in a way that will help the current generation of students face more effectively, and more joyfully, the life-related challenges that society presents to them,\u00a0 particularly in the United States.<\/p>\n
My visit to America will be short\u2014this time.\u00a0 Here with you today and on Thursday with Microsoft in Seattle, but I am realizing more and more how important it is for us in Rome to understand the complexity of the bioethical questions that you face, and indeed how true it is that many of the bioethical questions that are now being dealt with globally had their origin in the United States.\u00a0 All too often we witness a failure of communication on these issues, whether through linguistic differences, cultural differences, or indeed surprisingly different theological or philosophical approaches that condition the ways we address and teach the things that are foundational to our Catholic Christian faith and commitment.<\/p>\n
To help make you more aware of this situation, and perhaps help us move more surely toward a common understanding and appreciation of our task as bioethicists, I would like to tell you something about the Academy for Life today and about how its course has now been charted by the very important letter that Pope Francis wrote to the Academy on the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of its founding by St. John Paul and the Servant of God and great scientist, J\u00e9r\u00f4me Lejeune.<\/p>\n
In that letter, written on January sixth of this year and called Humana Communitas<\/em>, the Pope recalls for us the great theological truth that must be our guiding principle\u2014all of creation is brought into being by God\u2019s love, a love that is so profound that itself it is a family, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and that it is a family so fruitful that it has produced on Earth a family that mirrors it\u2014the great family of humanity that is able to know who brought it into being, to love its Creator, to manifest that love through service to God and humanity, and at the end of time to live forever with that same loving Creator.\u00a0 Moreover, the passionate family love that has brought the human family into being, so loves that family\u2014the Humana Communitas<\/em>\u2014that, through Jesus Christ, God has become our Brother\u2014to redeem us, to comfort us, to remind us constantly of our dignity as God\u2019s creation, and to guide us through life to our eternal home.<\/p>\n In his letter, the Holy Father attempted to give us such a solid and loving theological basis for the work of the Academy that we will be able to address and overcome the concerns and the hesitancies that have greeted the renewed structure of the Academy (and I might add of its sister entity, the John Paul II Institute as well).<\/p>\n Thus, my message today is that to understand the mission that the Holy Father has given to the Academy, and the Institute, we have to understand that while science and technology do contribute to the overall good of man and the fulfillment the God\u2019s plan for salvation, and that our members and programs will continue to offer solutions to specific societal concerns, we must now work more broadly\u2014toward an understanding, an appreciation, of life itself\u2014which is the great expression of the love that is God.<\/p>\n And we must work to teach the women, men and children of today what life itself means, what God had in mind when, as an outpouring of the passionate love that makes God a family, the Humana Communitas<\/em>, the human family, came into being, and God Himself, in Jesus Christ, became its first-born member.<\/p>\n As a very practical first step, we must reassure our friends, and our enemies, that we will never slacken our resolve to protect and promote human life from its beginning to the end of its earthly days, and that our dialogue with others who do not share our understanding of God\u2019s fruitful love and of the nature of the human family and its challenges, does not mean that we are abandoning Catholic orthodoxy.<\/p>\n With that, however, we must also make it clear that the Pope wants the Academy, and the Institute, to (1) widen its scope of reflection, not limiting itself to addressing \u201cspecific situations of ethical, social or legal conflict,\u201d (2) articulate an anthropology that sets the practical and theoretical premises for \u201cconduct consistent with the dignity of the human person,\u201dand (3) make sure it has the tools to critically examine \u201cthe theory and practice of science and technology as they interact with life, its meaning and its value.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition, the Academy in particular is to become more and more a place of competent and respectful meeting and dialogue among experts, including those from other religious traditions as well as proponents of world views the Academy needs to know better in order to widen its horizons.<\/p>\n Further, in line with the Holy Father\u2019s own commitment \u201cto promote appropriate sinodality at all levels of ecclesial life,\u201d we consider this broader mandate an encouragement to develop, in our own way, a \u201csynodal\u201d approach to our activities\u2014generous collaboration leading to enthusiastic evangelization.<\/p>\n As we see that our world is changing at an ever-increasing rate, with the greatest changes taking place in technology, we are trying to keep our expanded mission in clear focus as we examine the world around us.<\/p>\n Much of what we see today is the result of a hyper-individualist perspective that is affecting and weakening all social relations.\u00a0\u00a0 Society is becoming \u201cfluid,\u201d with the \u201cme\u201d prevailing over the \u201cus.\u201d\u00a0 Paradoxically, in a globalized world, the more welcoming and inclusive that \u201cfluidity\u201d appears to be, they more people feel\u00a0 \u201clost,\u201d and want to close in on themselves, to concentrate on their own interests.<\/p>\n Between the individual and the human community, a real schism seems to have developed, with serious consequences for the crucial question of the unity of the human family and its future.\u00a0 Just when humanity possesses the technical-scientific ability to reach generalized well-being, which could help to realize God\u2019s loving vision for the human family found in the Scriptures and reflected in the Church\u2019s social teaching, we see a worsening of conflicts and a breakdown of relationships.\u00a0 As a result, we witness the well-known decline of the Enlightenment myth of progress and generalized suspicion about techno-scientific activity, particularly in life-related areas.<\/p>\n Technology has changed from being a positive tool for well-being, to becoming a threat to life, as it feeds risk and uncertainty in society.\u00a0 Solutions proposed by techno-science give rise to challenging and complicated problems.\u00a0 Look at the following examples:\u00a0 the environmental crisis\u2014today we must defend nature from technology just as technology defended us from nature in the past\u2014and, in the field of medicine, the appearance of diseases (or pathological states) that were unimaginable in the past and are now common, for example, conditions that arise in neonatal intensive care or in vegetative states.<\/p>\n To provide guidance on how to deal with today\u2019s anthropological and ethical questions, the Pope\u2019s letter offers the Academy various ideas.\u00a0 First, he warns us that it is risky to look at human life in a way that detaches it from experience and reduces it to biology or to an abstract universal, separated from relationships and history.\u00a0 Rather, the term “life” must be redefined, moving from an abstract conception to a \u201cpersonal\u201d dimension:\u00a0 life is people, men and women, both in the individuality of each person and in the unity of the human family.\u00a0 Starting from our origin from the one Father, \u201call of us in the universe are united by invisible bonds and in a way we form a universal family.\u201d (LS 89).\u00a0 The Pope thus evokes the dynamics of generation\u2014passive reception of life is the premise for every subsequent activity, leading to the recognition of being one\u2019s child, welcomed and cared for, even if not always adequately.\u00a0 This is the starting point for the recognition of the social bond that makes us support one another and that, because it is reciprocal, asks us to be responsible for each other: The Pope tells us that …\u201cIt seems reasonable to build a bridge between the care that has been received since the beginning of life, and that has enabled it to unfold throughout the course of its development, and care that is to be given to others.\u201d (N. 9).<\/p>\n This way of understanding human life, starting from the experience that ties it to relationships, asks, from the beginning, to be appropriately connected to the multiple ways in which bioethics considers the questions of life.\u00a0 It is a task that requires commitment.\u00a0 It is a reference point, not only for the ethical questions that are asked about the beginning and end of life, but also for questions of synthetic biology or about organisms that combine biological tissues and electronic devices.<\/p>\n Global bioethics<\/strong><\/p>\n The Pope\u2019s letter also discusses a number of particular questions.\u00a0\u00a0 First, he\u00a0 encourages the Academy to participate actively in the dialogue that is inspiring bioethical reflection in the context of globalization (Par. 10-11).\u00a0 It is imperative that we search for ethical reference points from which to measure developments in the natural sciences and bio-technologies.\u00a0 Given today\u2019s intense interaction between different cultures, it is necessary to work out universally shared operational criteria that can influence national and international policies.\u00a0 Human rights are in many respects the field on which this confrontation takes place, because they involve a series of questions shared by all human beings.\u00a0 Tellingly, recent Catholic thinking has given new attention to the doctrine of natural law in the search for a universal ethics. For example, the Holy See\u2019s International Theological Commission has produced a study entitled\u00a0 In Search of a Universal Ethics: A New Look at Natural Law<\/em>, Vatican City, 2009).<\/p>\n \u201cEmergent and convergent Technologies\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n A second front that Francis points out as an area for commitment is the one that deals with the technologies defined today as \u201cemergent\u201d and \u201cconvergent.\u201d (N. 12)\u00a0 These terms refer to nanotechnologies, biotechnologies, information technologies and cognitive sciences.\u00a0 We talk about NBIC\u00a0 (Nano-, Bio-, Information-, Cognitive- technologies).\u00a0 Their appearance in the activities of research institutions and industry accelerates change, expanding the areas where reality can be affected.\u00a0 Drastic interventions become available, not only therapeutic ones, but also those designed for the enhancement of living organisms, as well as new organizational procedures, including the transfer to artificial support of functions previously performed by the human body.\u00a0 We are faced not only new technical tools, but also with changes that deeply affect our relationship with the world:\u00a0 new IT devices are hidden with increasing pervasiveness in various areas of reality, including our body, which is increasingly exposed to the dynamics of bio-politics or psycho-politics.1<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n The Academy has started working on these issues beginning with its General Assembly last February, which was dedicated to robotics.\u00a0 It intends to take up the question of artificial intelligence next year.\u00a0 In fact, the possibility of intervening on living matter at ever smaller orders of magnitude, of processing ever larger volumes of information, of monitoring-and manipulating-the cerebral processes of cognitive and deliberative activity, has enormous implications:\u00a0 it crosses the threshold of the biological specificity and the spiritual nature of what is human. And it is necessary to keep clearly in mind, and maintain an adequate basis for, the specific difference between human life and other forms of life and autonomous activity.<\/p>\n Certainly we must remind ourselves, as Pope Francis did at our February meeting, that, \u201cArtificial intelligence, robotics and other technological innovations must be used in a way that serves humanity and contributes to the protection of our common home, instead of doing the opposite, as unfortunately sometimes happens.\u201d\u00a0 The inherent dignity of every human being must be placed without fail at the center of our reflection and action.<\/p>\n The ongoing debate among specialists already shows the serious problems of the governability of algorithms that process huge amounts of data.\u00a0 Likewise, technologies for manipulating genetic realities and cerebral functions also raise serious ethical questions.<\/p>\n On the other hand, the knowledge on which emergent and convergent technologies develop offers us great potential for improving the conditions of human life.\u00a0\u00a0 From the data of the empirical sciences we can get indications that make anthropological reflection possible, in both the philosophical as well as the theological field, as indeed has always been the case.\u00a0 We must remember, however, that in the context of that reflection, it would be decidedly contrary to the Academy\u2019s tradition to continue to use categories linked to the past that do not allow us to interpret today’s phenomena or to communicate within today’s cultures.<\/p>\n As our discussions today proceed, I would ask you to keep in mind what the Holy Father has asked the Academy to do, and copies of his letter are available.\u00a0 We must enter with wisdom and boldness into today\u2019s bioethics arena so that we can understand our heritage of faith with a rationality that is worthy of man.\u00a0 It is for this reason that the Academy, and the Institute, without in any way abandoning the tradition and accomplishments of their founders, will participate in dialogue with everyone so that the development and use of the extraordinary resources that the Pope speaks of is oriented toward promoting the dignity of the person and the human family in the light of the passionate Divine love that brought it into being and will lead it safely home.<\/p>\n Thank you very much.<\/p>\n